The first stage of Sichuan addiction — experimentation — is brief and violent. You either get out immediately, vanquished and penitent, or something inside you changes. Inside your stomach and inside your brain, the surge of dopamine alters the neurochemistry, requiring the addict to seek to match that first, miraculous high. My initiation occurred in 1997 at Wu Liang Ye, one of Manhattan’s first Sichuan restaurants, which, the manager told me, was opened by the People’s Republic of China to promote awareness of the variety and complexity of Chinese cuisine.

This act of culinary propaganda was enormously successful — Sichuan restaurants soon began appearing all over New York. I later followed the Sichuan trail to restaurants in Sunset Park, Bensonhurst and the subterranean food courts in Flushing, which require a Chinese-speaking guide to navigate properly. It was a pastime, I told myself, all in good fun. Then I read about the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, which has the most-concentrated Chinese community in the U.S. and a staggering array of Sichuan restaurants. The most prominent of these — the Sichuan king of San Gabriel — is Chung King. The next time I was in L.A., I drove straight to San Gabriel Boulevard. That’s when I lost control. I don’t know if Chung King is the best Sichuan restaurant in America, but I can attest that it induces delirium.

A clarification: Sichuan food should not be confused with what most Americans understand to be Chinese food. It is distinguished by spicy, oil-based sauces that are flavored by salt, garlic, ginger, pickled chilies, doubanjiang — a spicy paste made from broad beans — and, most crucially, Sichuan peppercorns, which burst like Bang Snaps on your tongue and give the food its trademark flavor: ma la (“numbing spicy”). When your mouth is coated with ma la, water tastes like flat ginger ale. One Sichuan devotee I know describes the ma la sensation as a “tonguegasm.” The pulse increases and the pupils dilate, often accompanied by a postnasal drip. The brain floats in a euphoric ether.

Sichuan menus tend to list approximately 800 dishes, and at many lesser restaurants each comes drowned in a numbing, spicy oil. But Sichuan cuisine has, in fact, 22 other flavors besides ma la. This I learned from Fuchsia Dunlop’s definitive Sichuan cookbook, “Land of Plenty,” in which she describes each of these flavors, including “red-oil flavor,” “fragrant wine flavor” and, my favorite, “strange-flavor,” which combines ma la with han (salty), tian (sweet), suan (sour), xian (fresh-savory) and xiang (fragrant) notes.

On my return to Chung King this summer, I determined to try as many of the 23 flavors as possible. I began with Chung King-flavored noodles; these were numbing and spicy, to be certain, but also had a note of “scorched-chili flavor,” which is derived from mixing fried, dried chili with soy sauce, Sichuan pepper, vinegar, garlic and sugar. A dry, cumin-dusted lamb rubbed with large chunks of garlic and chili peppers delivered the dense “smoked flavor.” Spicy eggplant, a Sichuan staple, tasted as if it had been fermented in vinegar, a blending of the “homestyle” and “fish-fragrant” flavors. Most magnificent, however, were the boiled fish slices, garnished with fresh cilantro, in a bowl of hot sauce, in which could be perceived not just the Sichuan peppercorn but also star anise — a trademark of the elite “five-spice flavor.” The fried chicken with garlic and crunchy red chili peppers might have been imbued with the sublime “strange-flavor,” but by that point my mouth was numb.

I always make a point of ordering some dish unsettling to the Western sensibility in the assumption that it must be authentic and therefore marvelous. At Chung King, the best way to do this is to walk to the back of the restaurant, where there stands a kind of deli counter arrayed with a number of cold dishes that the restaurant does not include on the English menu. I pointed at a platter that seemed to contain thin slabs of red marble. I was told that these were sliced pig ears. They were salty and greasy (“Sichuan pepper flavor,” from raw Sichuan pepper mashed with green scallions, salt and sesame oil). I ate them all.

What I’m Into: AlMichaelsAs told to Spencer Bailey

“I don’t eat any vegetables. None. I have never eaten vegetables. As I grew older, I just would not even look at them. If I died right now, I might be the human being who lived the longest without ever eating a vegetable.”

Don’t Guzzle the ArtBy Tom Rachman

In a lab of spinning flasks and mysterious potions, the amateur chemists toil away with base materials like gin, equipment like a centrifuge and the highly unscientific objective of concocting the most sensual cocktails known to man. “It’s not just about liquid in a glass. It’s how you smell that liquid, how you see that liquid, how you taste that liquid, what that liquid does once it’s in your mouth,” Tony Conigliaro said. We were conversing amid the whirring machinery of the Drink Factory, his laboratory in Pink Floyd’s former London recording studios, crammed with hundreds of peculiar cocktail ingredients, from nettles and Sichuan pepper to Transylvanian bee pollen. “For us, it’s about the complete journey from the minute you walk in the bar to everything else, all the way up to the drink.”

Conigliaro, 41, is shy and retiring for a barman, but he is nevertheless an inspirational figure on the drinks scene of London. After experimenting with advanced culinary techniques in the late ’90s, he was introduced to the work of Ferran Adrià, the Spanish icon of molecular gastronomy, and that inspired a kind of molecular mixology. Some of his creations are wild (a cosmopolitan that he shatters into “popcorn” with liquid nitrogen); others might be considered just plain strange (a vodka drink inspired by soil, flavored with clay, flint and moss); others reconfigure classics (a rhubarb gimlet or an apple-and-hay Bellini). Several are concept drinks, like the Rose, which was intended to evoke a stroll through an English garden with a glass of Champagne; or Les Fleurs du Mal, a rose vodka-and-absinthe tribute, he says, to Baudelaire.

I conducted a few experiments on myself, involving nine cocktails, with the help of a lab assistant (drinking partner) whom I took on undercover visits to both of Conigliaro’s London bars. At 69 Colebrooke Row ­ — a tiny place with a ’50s hepcat theme ­ — the standouts included a Barbershop Fizz (pine-infused gin, birch and vanilla syrup, patchouli-infused mint, lime juice, topped with soda water), which possessed that classic cocktail characteristic of seeming utterly refreshing while having the opposite effect. The aromatic Honeysuckle (liqueur flavored with pollen, honey and honeysuckle, topped with Champagne), meanwhile, was like putting your nose over a honey pot that fizzes. His second bar, the Zetter Townhouse, has a loosely Georgian theme and includes a cocktail conjuring 18th-century naval history: the Master at Arms (dark rum, port reduction and homemade grenadine), a delicious dessert of a drink.

Looking around, though, my companion and I realized we were the only ones analyzing each mouthful. Other customers were not thinking about the liquid in the glass — the smell, the sight, the taste. They were throwing back drinks. Which is why the cocktail bar — even the fantastically inventive kind — is unlikely to reach the heights of a top restaurant. Part of its appeal is also its fatal weakness: the more you taste, the less well you taste.

The Best Matzo Ball on EarthBy David Sax

Matzo balls are an emotional and nostalgic minefield, and arguing over their virtues is a pointless blood sport among Jews. If you are foolish enough to complain about a matzo ball that’s served to you, you’re essentially spitting in the face of the cook, their mother, their bubby and several centuries of that family’s matriarchs. When asked, the only appropriate response to a question of matzo ball quality is: “My mother’s are the best in the world.”

At least that’s what I believed until I entered Fülemüle, a small restaurant in Budapest, which serves Hungarian-style Jewish dishes including a goose-matzo-ball soup. Once a staple of the Eastern European Jewish diet, goose is now largely forgotten by North American Jews, whose love of chicken has launched a thousand kosher caterers. András Singer, Fülemüle’s chef and owner, who died in July, took me into the kitchen, where a pot simmered with chunks of goose back and wing meat, carrots, garlic, brussels sprouts, mushrooms and other spices for the broth. He took out a metal mixing bowl and crushed five whole matzos, explaining that the imperfect texture was better than the uniform mush from preground matzo meal. He added eggs, ginger and parsley, salt and pepper, and a few healthy tablespoons of melted goose fat, mixed it all around and rolled them into squash balls, which he dropped into boiling salted water.

When the matzo balls were cooked, Singer placed them in a bowl with chunks of dark pulled goose meat, the vegetables and a few ladles of amber broth. I took my first bite and knew right then that I was eating the greatest matzo ball on earth. The irregularity of the ball’s shape made chewing a mental game — the equivalent of eating a country sourdough after decades of Wonder Bread — and the ginger gave enough kick to cut through the schmaltz. How would I break the news to my mother?

“Krispy Kreme is really like heroin to me. I’ve literally gone to Krispy Kreme when it’s first out of the oven, bought a dozen to share and eaten eight of them before my destination, which was three blocks away. That’s not an exaggeration.”

War RationsBy Damien Cave

There are a few basic rules that define food in wartime: Eat what you can, when you can; share; appreciate what you have. That’s as true for Marines in Iraq as it is for the Issa family, whom I met in the tiny Lebanese village Rama, just over the Syrian border, one month after they fled Syria’s grinding conflict.

It was Ramadan, and the usual menu for the sunset meal that breaks the daily fast had been winnowed to a handful of dishes. The kitchen of the Issas’ borrowed concrete home lacked an oven — they used a borrowed hot plate — and the electricity cut in and out. “It’s as if we went back to the Stone Age,” Maha Issa said, wiping sweat from her brow after describing the sweets she would have made at home. “We are restricting ourselves to only what is necessary.”

Three families, with a total of 21 people, had moved into the house, and every meal was a team effort. Maha knelt on the floor in a long dress, rapidly spooning spiced meat into pillows of doughy dumplings that were stewed in yogurt for a dish called shishbarak. Her sister-in-law oversaw the burners, while their daughters, in skinny jeans and headscarves, cut vegetables. At the edge stood Mohammed, Maha’s husband, a real estate agent in their hometown, Homs. “My parents are still there,” Maha said. “They get shelled every day. And my son. He’s 21.” She used a small teacup to cut out dough circles for the dumplings. “I want to go home.”

“Why would you say that?” her husband asked. “Because I do!” she said. Mohammed shook his head but smiled. It was her kitchen.

Minutes later, dishes flowed out two at a time: rice and chicken sautéed in tomatoes and onions, tabbouleh, French fries, fried dumplings, dumplings stewed in yogurt, large round discs of kibbe, ground lamb cut into diamonds. There were dates, there was bread and there was Pepsi. Finally Maha signaled it was time to sit down.

Then, as if on cue, there was an explosion. None of the Issas reacted. The clink of forks on plates and the rustle of bread in plastic bags were the only sounds. Mohammed joked that he would have returned his wife to her family if she hadn’t been such a good cook. The children turned on a small television; the women cleared the plates. Fruit and tea followed. Then Mohammed’s phone rang, and he jumped up to the window hoping for better reception. All eyes and ears tuned in. It was his cousin in Syria. The war was back.

What to Eat on the Frozen TundraBy Elisabeth Rosenthal

You don’t want to be squeamish, and you especially don’t want to be vegan, if you visit Greenland. Greenland is so far north that little grows there, and its haute cuisine is centered on the animals that you probably have never eaten before — ones that can survive in its frigid seas and on its ice-covered land. They include, but are not limited to, whale, seal, musk ox, polar bear and reindeer, something of a national delicacy.

Thinly sliced into steaks, reindeer is an extremely lean and tender meat that is at once delicate, slightly sweet and gamy — a combination I’d never previously encountered. It was the only dish I ordered more than once during my six days in the country. At the opposite end of the spectrum was polar bear, which I sampled when invited to a traditional Inuit wedding. It was hard to chew and harder to swallow — stringy, fatty and coarsely meaty. Nothing, absolutely nothing, tasted like chicken.

The Chile Capital of the WorldBy Abe Streep

Some of the best chile peppers in the world are grown in Hatch, N.M., about four hours south of Santa Fe, which bills itself as the Chile Capital of the World, though Socorro, further north, has been making inroads. I’ve lived in Santa Fe for five years, and I know of no other town with a tourism- and restaurant-driven economy that relies so heavily on one ingredient. In the fall, the whole town smells of the rich smoke of fresh green chiles being broiled in rotisserie-style roasters: Big Jim, a fat pepper that’s perfect for chiles rellenos; sandias, hotter and smaller, good for stews; Joe E. Parkers, which fall along the milder end of the spice spectrum.

Some people swear by the nuclear stuff at the Horseman’s Haven, a diner adjacent to a gas station that serves chile in two different spice levels. (Despite a warning, I recently tried a thimbleful of the Level 2 on my breakfast burrito and left the restaurant in tears.) Others prefer La Choza, a funky New Mexican restaurant, or the Red Enchilada, a truly good hole in the wall. But most real chile addicts buy it in bulk from the vendors on Cerrillos Road, a four-lane artery lined with carwashes and big-box stores.

That’s where I went recently to stock up before moving to New York. I stopped at Fred’s Socorro Chile, which sells about 1,000 bushels a week during harvest season and helps supply some of Santa Fe’s top restaurants. I bought a half-bushel of Socorro Big Jim chiles the size of flashlights for $25. In another parking lot, I found a guy selling Hatch chiles, which are smaller and spicier. There was a connoisseur behind me in line, an immense man in an Iron Maiden T-shirt. “Did you ask to taste them before buying?” I hadn’t. “I always ask to taste them. Did you see the veins?” I hadn’t. “I look for the yellow veins. That’s when they get really hot. I like them hot.”

The vendor finished roasting my chiles and handed me the burlap sack. I offered the connoisseur a taste. He seemed satisfied, and so did I, because the other thing about freshly roasted chile is that the scent lingers, especially in cars. It was comforting to know that when I drove to New York a week later, I’d be smelling New Mexico all the way there.

From the mid-1960s until my mother died in 2003, I visited Copper Harbor, a little town at the tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly every summer. If you’ve been to this part of the country, you know pasties — a sort of beef stew in a pastry shell that originated in Cornwall and came to the area with Cornish miners in the late 1800s. Back then the Upper Peninsula was the site of a copper boom. By 1900, Calumet, the nearest city to Copper Harbor, had a 16,000-volume library and an elaborate opera house where Sarah Bernhardt performed, and eight foreign-language newspapers. But the copper ran out and the Depression came, and today Calumet is a village of some 700 people in a region of ghost towns and abandoned mines.

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As is so often the case, food is the last tradition left from those glory days, and I returned to Copper Harbor this summer in search of pasties (properly pronounced with a soft “a”). The dish inspires a fair amount of passion there, and I heard the first pasty argument as I walked out of the airport. Potatoes and onions are a given, but carrots are controversial, and a particularly fierce squabble concerns turnips versus rutabagas. There’s also the question of whose are best this year. (A current favorite is found on Fridays at the Mohawk Superette.) After sampling at least a dozen versions — some with thick, soggy pastry, others with gnarly meat, yet others drenched with (apostasy!) gravy — I’m partial to those from Toni’s Country Kitchen in Laurium, Calumet’s sister village.

Eric Frimodig, the folksy, genial guy who has owned and run the place since 1982, is a third-generation pasty expert. He eschews carrots and comes down firmly on the side of rutabagas because, “they’re sweeter than turnips, and they’ve got that nice orangy color so everything isn’t white and brown.” When you fork through it, a bit of steam comes drifting out, bringing with it the rich aroma of root vegetables and meat and onion, a smellthat tugs at the taste memory of anyone raised on hearty European-derived food. It instantly brings you back to real copper country.

The last time I was in Tokyo, I took an early-evening constitutional to the mythic Yakitori Alley, tucked under train tracks near Yurakucho Station and spilling out onto the street. It was everything I dreamed of: lopsided makeshift stalls, low tables with backless stools, dudes in suits and, of course, smoky grills operated by very focused chefs. The menus were long and filled with all kinds of delicacies — everything from pork tongue to more-challenging items like pork uterus.

I went to a disheveled stand with five or six people waiting, assuming it was the best. The menu was almost all pork, chicken and vegetables, but the chicken was divided into very, very specific subcategories. There were recognizable items like skin, gizzards, wings and thighs, but also unique items like inner thighs, breast plate and cartilage.

I love every part of the chicken: the pope’s nose, the oysters hidden along the center of the back bone, the liver, the heart, the gizzards and the odd pieces on the underside of the rib cage. My favorite of all, though, is the pristine cartilage attached to the lower-leg-thigh connection — basically, the kneecaps. Discovering a place that serves a chicken kneecap is exciting. Discovering a place that serves a bunch of them — carefully lined along a wooden skewer, grilled over hardwood charcoal and basted with a slightly sweet-and-sour miso glaze — is heavenly.

The kneecap skewer was crunchy and firm, peppery from the sansho I dusted on it, and yet succulent beneath the light char. As I chewed through the cartilage, the crunch was barely audible. I got two more, burying one in sansho and finishing the other one with yuzu. On the walk home, I floated with the plum leaves in the smoke above the station.

Bruce Ratner: What I’m IntoAs told to Spencer Bailey

“I’ve never met a chicken I didn’t like. Whether it’s Kentucky fried or whether it’s barbecued or it’s wings or it’s sautéed, that’s my food. And I’m not particular about where I eat it. No. 1 would be Kentucky Fried Chicken. That’s not politically correct, but I would say that’s the best chicken. General Tso’s chicken — that’s good, too. Chin Chin restaurant in Manhattan — that’s good chicken.”

Ital is VitalBy Peter Meehan

I was driving through the damp sweater of Jamaica’s summer heat with Roy Johnson, a k a Congo Ashanti, a founder of the Congos, whose 1977 album, “The Heart of the Congos,” is one of the finest vocal reggae albums ever cut. I was in Roy’s car for two reasons. First, the Congos made one of my favorite records of the year, the trancelike “Icon Give Thank.” And second, because while watching “Icon Eye,” the documentary about the making of the album, there were several scenes starring Ital food, the predominantly vegetarian diet of the Rastafarian faith. One day, the Congos’ recording session was fueled by a shake made of cooked pumpkin, peanuts and oats and spiked with nutmeg. Another scene focused on Winston Jones, a k a Drummerman, who runs an Ital food shop in Portmore, near the Congos’ studio. I had to go there.

A chief goal of the Ital diet is to enhance vitality — the root of its name. “The food we eat give us strength to sing the music that we sing,” Roy told me. Dairy, alcohol and meat are out; fish is permissible, and salt is eschewed by many. The diet is, in part, a rejection of what the Rastafari call the Babylon system, a way of life seen as oppressive and contrary to healthful living. In a supermarket, this takes the form of junk food, artificial seasonings and products of industrialized agriculture.

I ate nearly all of my Ital meals at Drummerman’s food shop, which is really a shack in the corner of his yard. Breakfasts were plastic bowls of neutral-colored sludgy porridge served piping hot even on scorching Jamaican mornings. A blend of raw peanuts and oats (or sometimes bulgur, with the chance addition of puréed banana), and sweetened with a strong dose of brown sugar, it was flavorful and sustaining.

Lunch and dinner included vegetable staples of the Ital repertory: a dark stew of “veggie chunks” (textured vegetable protein) seasoned with allspice; a tangle of complexly flavored cooked-down callaloo greens; a quick sauté of shredded white cabbage, scented with garlic, tossed with a garden mix of corn, lima beans, pumpkin shreds and more. A starch, like rice and peas, held down the rest of the serving. I also had a too-big helping of whole-wheat dumplings, little plugs of pan-cooked whole-wheat dough, which were moist and dense and perfect for sopping up with.

One night Drummerman had snapper on offer. Served room temperature, it was crisp and golden brown on the outside, the flesh still moist. He served it with bammy, a slab of pan-fried flatbread, which I thought was depressingly monochromatic until I ate a bite, and then another.

Juices, a steady component of the Ital diet, were also excellent. Tart plum juice, tamed with sugar and ginger and a touch of lime, was my favorite. “Average people in Jamaica don’t eat from Rasta, don’t drink from Rasta,” Roy told me one languorous afternoon. “And we don’t rush them. But they don’t know what they’re missing.”

For hard-core wine purists, a pilgrimage must be made to eastern Georgia, where they still use a 5,000-year-old technology called qvevri. There, wine is aged in huge, beeswax-lined, turret-shaped clay pots that are buried in soil. In this deeply religious country, winemakers are obsessed with purity. Sulfur is still associated with the devil, and many shun it and other additives.

I was compelled to take the trip after a few stateside glasses of juicy, rusty-hued kisi and the honey-scented mtsvane (both whites) and spicy saperavi (a red). After a bumpy Aerosvit flight, I arrived ragged to a crumbling, yet beautiful, wine-obsessed country at the precipice of viticultural modernization. There are already some large wineries using stainless steel tanks and making chardonnay, but I visited a number of others — including Alaverdi Monastery and Pheasant’s Tears — who still do it the old-fashioned way. At one vineyard, I met a winemaker named Iago Bitarishvili. It soon became clear that he was the master of chinuri. He stomps the grapes, fills the pots, seals the wine for fermentation and bottles it when stable. Only after drinking his chinuri’s lemony richness was I revived.

Eating Like a CavemanBy William Neuman

A little before 10 a.m., we crossed the Capanaparo River and pulled into a speck of a town called La Macanilla, deep in the plains of western Venezuela. The man in the front passenger seat of our S.U.V. was named Lolo, and he’d been telling us he was hungry for more than an hour. Lolo, who loves to eat and loves to talk, ran for mayor in this impoverished corner of Venezuela. Sometimes when he greeted voters, as in La Macanilla, he hiked up his orange shirt to show his bare belly, round and smooth as a brass Buddha’s. It was a kind of campaign ad: I eat well; vote for me, and you can too.

Lolo raises, buys and sells cattle, which is what was on the menu that morning — barbecue for breakfast. The way they do it here is called carne en vara, which means beef on a stick. It is primitive, elemental and delicious. We stopped at a nameless restaurant next to the road that consisted of a tin roof with no walls, a few plain wooden tables and chairs. In one corner was a steel box without a top, about two and a half feet high. A few logs were burning inside. Large hunks of bright red beef, cut from the carcass of a cow that was raised a few miles away and probably killed yesterday, were cooking on skewers over the coals. Parts were charred. Parts were bloody. It was caveman food.

The way carne en vara works is you tell the cook how much you want, by weight. The first time I ate carne en vara (for dinner), I was in the company of a more penurious friend who liked to order by the half kilo or quarter kilo. That wasn’t Lolo’s style. He started with a kilo or a kilo and a half and went up from there. The cook pulled the stick off the fire and sliced a chunk of meat into a tin pan, which he put onto a hanging scale. Then he cut it into bite-size chunks and dumped them on a plate. The plate was plopped onto the center of the table, and a tray of crackerlike cassava bread was set out. No cutlery. Just gorging.

I’ve pulled many steaks, charred outside, bloody inside, off the grill back home in Brooklyn, but it was never like this. Maybe it’s eating with your hands. Maybe it’s the wild sweep of the plains all around. The first time I ate carne en vara I was covered in grease. But I noticed that no one else seemed to be piling up the paper napkins. The next time I watched my tablemates and I saw that for all its primitive excess, there’s a delicacy about eating carne en vara. You use your fingertips to pick through the bloody and charred pieces until you find the one that speaks to you. Then you pop it into your mouth and start the hunt for the next one.

The Naan ChallengeBy Jeffrey Gettleman

I was on a quest for the perfect buttered naan, the chewiest, flakiest, butteryest, most succulent piece of fire-roasted flatbread. Though often relegated to the world of side dishes, an ancillary part of any Indian feast, baked in a Tandoori oven, sometimes with garlic, sometimes with butter, sometimes plain, it is, for me, always inspiring. And so my quest landed me in Diamond Plaza in the heart of Nairobi’s old Indian community, which sprouted roots here more than a century ago, dragged to Africa by the British to build a railroad. A lot of those Indian railroad workers were eaten by lions, and the railroad ended up being called the Lunatic Express, but I digress.

Diamond Plaza is a mall with a somewhat shabby but otherwise legendary food court that is not for the faint at heart. The moment you arrive and sit on the worn picnic-style benches, you are immediately swarmed by a gang of waiters, each man’s crisply ironed shirt representing his organization: Bismillah BBQ — Where Quality Matters, Happy Chunkie’s Kitchen, Anilz, Chick Corner, American Delights: House of Chapati, Fresh ’n’ Healthy (a juice bar) and so on and so on. The waiters push and shove and giggle and jostle, eager for you to order from them.

I presided over a quick congress. Who had the best buttered naan? Of course there was no agreement, so I ordered three different naans from three different places. Bombay Chowpatty’s arrived first. Two bites in I realized that it was good, really good, actually, chewy and deliciously greasy. Then came its cousin, a naan from a similarly named restaurant, Chowpaty. It was a little doughier, maybe plucked from the tandoori oven a minute prematurely. Of course, any fresh naan is good naan, and don’t let anyone lead you to think otherwise.

But then came Anilz’s. It was the pièce de résistance, the answer to my prayers. It was left intact, not cut into triangles and unceremoniously stuffed into little plastic baskets like the others. This beaut was a foot-long piece of steaming hot bread, proudly stretched out on a real ceramic plate, in all of its glory, both soft and chewy and charred and crunchy in spots, a few delicious pools of melted butter tucked into the hills and valleys of its bready landscape. There were forks wrapped in paper napkins, but who needed those? This was a fingertip job, and it went cruelly quickly.

Three minutes later Anilz’s offering had vanished into my guts. I looked up to issue my pronouncement and to share this momentous occasion with the waiters. The winner is. . . . But they were busy swarming other tables, teetering over new customers, giggling and jostling and flapping their laminated menus.

Wendy Williams: What I’m IntoAs told to Spencer Bailey

“I carry my own Frank’s Red Hot sauce because there are a lot of places where everything is good, and when it comes to the sauces, they pull out Tabasco sauce. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Frequently, Frank’s is the one thing I’ll have in my bag.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 14, 2012, on Page MM42 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Desperately Seeking Supper. Today's Paper|Subscribe